Exploring American Folk Music

by Kip Lornell

  Clothing provides musicians with another chance to improvise and insinuate change. Fashion trends, in fact, are sometimes set by musicians. Since the late 1980s a “B-Boy” fashion sense, characterized by hi-top, multicolored, untied sneakers, sweat suits, bright hats, baggy britches, and long key chains swept across the nation from its hearth area in hard-core urban areas. These fashions now cut across racial and ethnic lines, informing other African Americans as well as Asian Americans and white folks in the heartland of North Dakota. What began as a community-based, folk expression perpetuated by younger urban black males was soon adopted (and adapted) by popular culture trendsetters and quickly transported throughout the United States. The widespread dissemination of hip-hop music (most notably rap) followed a similar pattern, helping to reinforce a “homeboy” attitude.

  The voice itself is quite a versatile tool and black singers often use a variety of techniques, such as growls and slurs, to create an original sound. Mississippi blues singers like Howlin’ Wolf or Robert Johnson often employed a falsetto and a vocal leap of an octave for dramatic effect. Wolf preferred an eerily cast guttural howl (hence his name), while Johnson’s thinner wordless moans have influenced a new generation of singers as the repackaging of his 1937 and 1938 recordings have sold over a million copies! Bobby McFerrin, who emerged as a solo and jazz singer in the early 1980s, calls upon an arsenal of similar vocal effects that reflects his African American heritage. Improvisation forms the core of McFerrin’s performances (when he’s not conducting) and he freely draws upon “false” voices (falsetto and bass ranges), whoops, vocal trills, and other techniques in his performances. Looking back to the Reconstruction era (if not earlier), another essentially solo artist, the lone worker in the field, sang freely improvised arhoolies. These singers frequently utilized not only free meter but also vocal techniques such as octave-based yodels and half-tone slides or slurs to regain the proper pitch.

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  MUSICAL EXAMPLE

  Sonny Terry was born just after the turn of the century in the Piedmont of North Carolina. Totally blind since childhood, Terry earned his livelihood by way of music. The harmonica was his chosen instrument and he became a virtuoso instrumentalist by the time that he was in his twenties. His early repertoire included country dance tunes, religious songs, and blues. Terry also learned to play many of the standard novelty pieces, such as “Lost John” and “Fox Chase.” This exceptional train imitation was recorded in the middle 1950s.

  Title “Locomotive Blues”

  Performer Sonny Terry

  Instruments harmonica and voice

  Length 3:22

  Musical Characteristics

  1. Terry cleverly mixes his instrument and vocal effects into a seamless whole.

  2. There are numerous changes in tempo that reflect the story line.

  3. Note the many effects—slurring, whooping, etc.—that Terry obtains from his small instrument.

  4. The performance mixes singing with speech.

  Spoken: Well ladies and gentlemen, this that old local train leaving out from Washington, D.C., heading south. The old fireman got up and rung his bell; he rung it like this, you know. Woosh!

  Well, you know that old fireman sat down and the old engineer got on up and blowed his whistle, blowed so lonesome; sorta like this. Then the old engineer sat down, said “Oh, well, leaving here.” Just reached down and grabbed the starter, pulled it off and started off easy; like this.

  They got way on down the curve . . . When that old fireman rung the bell, something like this again. Ssshh!

  And then old fireman sat down and the engineer said “Blow your whistle ’cause we’re going a little fast here. Maybe a cow be on the rail and we can slow up on it.” Blow his whistle lonesome, you know.

  They got on down, pulling that little grade, you know, the train got to slowing down, got to doing like this.

  Got over that grade, balling the jack, way on down the road. Getting on close down towards Richmond, Virginia.

  He’s blowing for Richmond, Virginia, now.

  Pulling up in the yard now, fixing to stop. Woosh!

  Smithsonian Folkways 32035.

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  Gospel quartet singers like Wilmer Broadnax (“Little Axe”) of the Spirit of Memphis or Claude Jeter of the Sawn Silvertones are highly regarded for their battery of vocal tricks. In fact, the church has been the training ground for many secular singers. Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, “Little Johnny” Taylor, Dinah Washington, Lou Rawls, and Dionne Warwick are just six of the scores of performers who came up through the gospel ranks to reach stardom in the 1960s or later. And the church—often Baptist but sometimes Pentecostal—is where many of them learned to reiterate words or phrases for dramatic effect (“Lord, Lord, Lord”), toss out words or phrases in a call and response with their audience (“Let me hear an Amen!”), or employ a wordless moan for emotional emphasis. In one guise or another, most live performances of black popular music in the new millennium contain many of these same elements that help to underscore the symbiotic—and to some degree, seamless—relationship between the secular and sacred in African American musical culture.

  The career and musical contributions of the Golden Gate Quartet illustrate this process: the mix of the secular and sacred as well as the crossover from a mostly black to a racially mixed audience. It is also important to understand that this gospel group made such a transition about twenty-five years before Barry Gordy found a wider mainstream audience for his Motown artists beginning in the early 1960s. While their career was briefly discussed in chapter 6, it is worth reemphasizing three critical points. First, they integrated secular with sacred material in their performances as early as 1937. Second, Willie Johnson’s innovative approach to vocalizing combined singing with speaking, just as do many hip-hop artists. Third, their music found a wide audience not only among churchgoers but also among fans of popular music, and they easily crossed over from a black world to reach the ears of white listeners by way of their recordings and nationwide radio broadcasts. The Gates, as they were known to their fans, inspired an entire generation of quartets, including the Dixie Hummingbirds, Pilgrim Travelers, and the CBS Trumpeteers.

  The CBS Trumpeteers were one of the most popular gospel quartets in the early 1950s. Courtesy of Kip Lornell.

  To capture a more distinctive sound black folk performers sometimes imitate sounds heard in nature or in the real world. The Golden Gate Quartet, for instance, rose to national prominence in the late 1930s partly on the strength of their uncanny train imitation, “Gospel Train,” an early, striking example of the jubilee quartet sound. Daniel Womack, a musician from rural Virginia, highly prized his vocal ability to imitate animals ranging from birds to dogs. In both black and white tradition the harmonica is used to imitate a fox chase or a train chugging down the track. Fiddlers (mostly white) have been heard to simulate birds on “Listen to the Mockingbird,” which remains a standard tune at fiddle contests, and many rural guitarists, such as Delta blues artist Bukka White or West Virginian Frank Hutchison, used a slide or bottleneck to simulate the sound of a freight train speeding down the track.

  On a recording such as “Rock Lobster” by the B-52s, the female vocalists Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson pay unconscious hommage to musicians like Daniel Womack with their wacky imitations of birds, fish, and other animals. These rockers from Athens, Georgia, also owe a small debt of gratitude to funk-sters such as George Clinton for their onstage garb as well as their retro hairstyles and advanced fashion sense, in particular. In “Love Shack” the B-52s look at a funky backwoods music and pleasure establishment, which is their own late-twentieth-century equivalent to the African American juke joint that could be found throughout the South into the 1950s. Such varied influences might not always be consciously acknowledged, but the fact that the B-52s are a pop group from the South with a strong sense of twentieth-century American popular musical styles underscores the sense that these musical/cultural connections might not be
directly understood but their existence is undeniable.

  Lyrical improvisation is another way in which black musicians make their own songs. This is most often accomplished through the use of oral formulas involving the substitution of phrases or words to create a new work. It is often found in strophic forms of black folk music: blues, work songs, and spirituals that utilize a verse-and-refrain format. Formulas can help to extend the length of a song. The camp meeting song, which probably began life as a spiritual, “Our Meeting Is Over,” extends its length as well as its emotional meaning through simple word substitution:

  Father, now our meeting is over, father we must part.

  If I never see you anymore, I have loved you from the start.

  Mother, now our meeting is over, mother we must part.

  If I never see you anymore, I have loved you from the start.

  Brother, now our meeting is over, brother we must part.

  If I never see you anymore, I have loved you from the start.

  Blues singers often make even greater use of more complex oral formulas based on the memorization of specific lines, verses, and songs. More importantly, this memorization helps the singer to perform verses that appear to be created spontaneously but are largely built upon patterns. Using this format as a building block, blues singers can sustain long, intricate performances. Some blues musicians are more inventive than others, of course, and make better and more extensive use of these oral building blocks. Others rarely vary their performances from one instance to another, almost as though a song is complete—a finished product—once it is composed and sung. Most singers rely upon these formulas to some degree, jauntily creating a new image by substitutes: “My jet black gal won’t give me but one thin dime” becomes “That women of mine keeps all my spending change.” By the same token “House lady, house lady, what in the world is wrong with you?” uses a few key substitutions to become “Good gal, good gal, how come you do me like you do?”

  Scholars have observed that the blues is an example of improvisation in everyday life; blues singers like Sleepy John Estes, Robert Pete Williams, and Big Joe Williams are among the most interesting and powerful poets in the field. Their language was both colorful and inventive and they draw upon their own experiences. In this regard they followed the advice given to many budding authors of fiction: write (or, in this case, sing) what you know about! The peripatetic Big Joe Williams often utilized the theme of wanderlust and physical movement in his songs. In the case of a blues singer like Estes, the best of his compositions from the late 1930s dealt with people, incidents, and places in or near his hometown of Brownsville, Tennessee, in songs such as “Floating Bridge,” “Railroad Police Blues,” or “Brownsville Blues.”

  The images found in blues by these artists are often both powerful and arresting. A longtime resident of Angola Prison in Louisiana, Robert Pete Williams often mused about his life and its relationship with the penal system. In thinking about how his life had been changed by the system, Williams (seemingly) tossed off the telling line “I’ve grown so ugly, I don’t even know myself” in one of his songs. Blues lyrics sometimes transcend the everyday world into the surreal. The stanza from a blues song by Bo-Weevil Jackson (also known as William Harris): “Heard a mighty rumbling deep down in the ground” (repeat) / “Was the boll-weevil and the Devil stealing somebody’s brown” suggests an unlikely and unearthly relationship between a pesky insect that wrought destruction upon cotton plants in the South during the decade of the 1910s and Satan. This is quite a concept, one that not only expands but also radically transcends the usual themes found in rural down-home blues.

  Visual and physical showmanship, an array of vocal techniques, and lyrical improvisation practiced by many black American performers contrast with the general aesthetics of Anglo-American musical culture. Grassroots black performers strive first to learn or even master the idiom, of course, but the next step is to make it their own, to place a unique imprimatur or stamp onto it. This is where the creative aspects of black culture come into greatest relief. These creative aspects of African American folk culture have most fully informed both black and white popular music since Reconstruction but especially over the last four decades of the twentieth century.

  RHYTHM AND BLUES

  African American popular music in the postmodern era has not escaped it roots. Nor has it tried to here in the twenty-first century. The “new negro” of the 1950s was striving to affect changes through social, economic, and cultural advances, which come under the category of progress through the civil rights movement. However, the historical facts of slavery, disenfranchisement, and segregation proved to be a powerful legacy, serving to remind black and white Americans of a racist past. Similarly, the folk roots of black music have been confirmed time and again, appearing and reappearing in various guises, into the present day.

  Rhythm and blues, a term coined in 1949, emerged as the first “new” black popular music following the close of World War II. Like so many forms of modern popular music, R&B grew out of jazz (most directly swing and be-bop) and the blues. The down-home blues had for many years been moving to the urban North as blacks spearheaded the Great Migration. Unlike rural blues, R&B is not the province of a solo artist, but is performed by a small ensemble. It first gained national prominence in New York City and Los Angeles. R&B owes a strong debt to swing bands, piano boogie woogie, and the Louis Jordan style of “jump bands.” Saxophones and, to a lesser degree, trumpets became an important voice—more prominently as a soloist—in these ensembles. These ensembles also often utilized guitars and, as electric guitars became more commonplace in the early 1950s, they took a more prominent role as a solo voice. The use of a full rhythm section of piano, bass, and drums also helped to promote the popularity of this music. All of these musical factors, as well as the country’s social climate, helped to set the scene for early rock ’n’ roll. R&B from the late 1940s quite frequently used the blues form and a simple duple meter or a quadruple meter.

  The traditional heritage of R&B is perhaps most evident in the vocals. “Shouters” like Roy Milton, Big Mama Thorton, Joe Liggins, Ruth Brown, and Amos Milburn used some of the moans and guttural vocal techniques of the earlier powerfully rich rural blues singers and gospel stylists. Many R&B performers also engaged in the call-and-response patterns so commonly found in black folk music. Sometimes it was a vocal chorus responding to the lead singer; in other instances the saxophone section engaged in a dialogue with the vocalists. Either way, the effect remained the same—a dialogue among the participants of the performance.

  In this regard, an R&B show from the early 1950s would have reminded one of a down-home Baptist church service with its interaction among the ensembles on stage and the audience helping to blur the established lines that usually demarcate the two components of the performance. The ongoing (and expected) antiphony that characterized live performances of this music underscores the familiarity of the participants with its well-established conventions and rules. It is significant that R&B flourished during segregation when black participants knew what to expect and how to interact, which also established some of the ground rules or expectations for the adoring audiences who came to worship at the feet of Elvis Presley later in the 1950s.

  By the middle 1950s R&B vocal groups like the Platters, Drifters, Larks, Nutmegs, Orioles, and Coasters, which owed a great deal to their sacred counterparts, began gaining national attention. These vocal ensembles adopted song forms other than twelve-bar blues, using eight- and sixteen-bar songs that reflect the influence of gospel and even Tin Pan Alley composers. Such ensembles soon spawned a host of white groups, many of them from greater New York City and Philadelphia, that emulated their vocal styles, stage mannerisms, and repertoire. By the late 1950s groups such as the Capris, Danny and the Juniors, and Dion and the Belmonts had become better known than their black counterparts.

  Within a few years these vocal ensembles were joined by solo male singers such as Brook Benton and
Jackie Wilson, many of whom began their careers with vocal harmony groups or in church singing groups. R&B gradually blended with other forms of black popular music. By the middle 1960s the style that Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, and Aretha Franklin represented so well in the late 1950s and early 1960s became known as soul.

  The popular R&B of the early 1950s had a profound influence on early rock ’n’ roll as it evolved a few years later. The earliest R&B practitioners mainly appealed to the black community but by 1953 it was slowly gaining a younger, white audience who were discovering (sometimes via the radio, occasionally through records) Piano Red, Amos Milburn, Big Mama Thorton, Buddy Johnson, Big Joe Turner, and other performers who were already well known in the black community. Little Richard, an outrageous performer whose piano antics, forceful shouting, and commanding stage presence won him a large multiracial audience, enthralled and captured their imaginations. Not only was Little Richard moving salaciously on stage—shaking his entire body, jumping on top of the piano, playing the keyboard while sitting on the ground—but he also wore makeup! Little Richard was exactly the kind of African American blues performer that caused parents a great deal of worry and anxiety. But teenagers like Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley appreciated not only his music but also his unpredictable and rebellious spirit. These are the very performance practices that can be traced back to such disparate earlier sources as rural down-home blues singers, minstrel shows, and Pentecostal churches.